I saw this sign earlier this week in Colorado Springs. Turns out that yes, it’s a real place
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What are the two things people don’t like doing on a regular basis? Why, washing their Vehicle and washing their Dog of course. Both are time consuming and messy. So I created a professional, clean and fun environment where you can bring your vehicle, dog or both and get them clean.
Tokyo Times points us to a car that wears its kawaii on its er um tires. Benny the Cab, anyone?
Like I said earlier, the old car is gone. Here’s the new one, a brand new Mazda RX8!
You don’t have to wear the bracelet now, you can get a magnetic picture of a bracelet. It’s not about the act of wearing, it’s just about the image of the bracelet? Where does the meaning reside?
WaPost on a stellar Hispanic car salesman
On the outside, a Hispanic car salesman may not appear radically different from the domestic model. But on the inside, he is thinking about how to bridge more complicated cultural currents. To succeed, he must also sell well to non-Hispanics, while in dealing with his own community, he must decide if he will be their champion — or use their trust to take advantage.
‘I have not received one call saying anything bad about German. That speaks highly of him,’ says Alejandro Carrasco, operator of Radio America, 1540 AM, a dominant figure in local Hispanic broadcasting who crusades against businesses preying on Latinos.
The Hispanic car salesman must also be savvy to differences. Hispanics are much more likely to take the advice of friends and relatives about what to buy and who to buy it from. They seek a guide in a land of dizzying choices and information overload.
If a car has a problem, a non-Hispanic buyer will report to the service department. Not Hispanics.
‘They come and see the salesperson, even if the service person speaks Spanish,’ says Gus Casabe, used-car manager at Alexandria Toyota, one of a handful of Hispanic salesmen in the area as long-established as Vidal. ‘It’s some kind of different relationship between the salesperson and the customer than American people have. . . . Once you get into a relationship with a Spanish customer, unless you do something crazy, it’s almost forever.’
Vidal says this customer loyalty is simply a cultural instinct of Latinos — a triumph of the relational over the transactional. ‘That’s what we are,’ is how Vidal explains it. ‘It’s our culture back home.’
Although the press is mad to talk about cultural and economic changes brought on by India and China, I think as interesting/complex/challenging a story is the globalization of the US through increasing immigration. This here is just one example of many, of course.
I rented a car from Budget earlier this week. I probably won’t do so again. They have a new practice, presented as a time-saving feature. If you drive less than 75 miles, they add $9.00 to your bill as a flat rate for gas consumption.
If you filled up yourself, present the bill and they’ll deduct the amount.
I didn’t pay that close attention upon renting when they asked me in their script-like manner if I planned to drive more than 75 miles. I mean, who the hell knows? I didn’t realize until checking the paperwork later that it wasn’t an optional program. I guess I could have used the odometer in the car to track my mileage to see what was going to happen, and then do some estimating math to see if the price of gas available locally at the car’s typical MPG would be more or less than $9.00. But I didn’t. I filled up the car myself, and remembered to have the receipt handy.
When I pull in to the return and am unloading the car, the usual parking-lot-Borg comes over with all their electronic gear, and when I ask about the charge, they tell me I have to go inside. So they ring me up, effectively charge me the amount including the $9 and then I have to take my bags back inside and wait for the one employee working inside to look over my receipts (one for gas, one for their service) and issue me a new version of the latter.
This is not a time- or money-saving feature for me. It probably makes money for them based on some estimated cut-off level, etc.
It’s not optional; I’m forced to alter a fairly traditional way of managing things to suit them. I’m not doing it. I’ll go somewhere else. It’s pretty much a commodity business anyway.
Simulator technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and car designers are building new understanding of the causes (and techniques for preventing) accidents. Lab testing absolutely has its place, but what are these tools doing to help understand the impact of real-world stress (road rage, traffic jams, late for a meeting) or distractions (your favorite song, an annoying cell phone call) – in other words, the context that doesn’t naturally occur in a laboratory. I fear the model is more to consider the human as a component with performance parameters and therefor engineer the hell out of the situation.
Driving simulators are interior mock-ups (or in some cases, complete cars) placed on hydraulically actuated platforms and surrounded by video screens and speakers. Drivers at the wheel feel vibrations, acceleration and deceleration just as if they were driving on the roads projected around them.
“You save 50 percent of your research time,” said Beuzit, noting one reason companies build multimillion-dollar simulators. “It has transformed the automobile industry in the last 20 to 30 years.”
Because the simulator experience is so close to reality, providing the physical sensation of going around a curve or bouncing over a badly paved road, scientists can use it to do fundamental research on how all the senses contribute to what a driver perceives, said Andras Kemeny, a research director at the technical center.
For Renault, he said, “It is absolutely necessary to understand the driver’s strategy in driving, and then design industrial objects according to this knowledge.” Kemeny said it would take a decade to complete the loop of bringing fundamental research results to showrooms.
’88 Dodge Aries is a fake TV ad for what was my first car. I can’t remember what year it was, but I bought it used. It had a really really awful smell in it, like an animal had died in it, but it took 3 months for the dealership perfume to wear off and for me to notice the smell. It needed a new radiator, but I had no idea; I just knew that even with the heat off, in the dead of winter, I couldn’t wear a jacket while I drove on the highway or I’d be just too hot.
I put a lot of miles on it, and then eventually it died – I think right around the time we traded it in for something else.
Just out on a walk with the dog. As we passed a house, with a somewhat inclined driveway, I hear a metallic creak. We paused and the noise came again. It sounded like it was coming from one of the cars parked in the driveway. A bit concerned, I watched, and the noise happened a third time, only this time the car inched backwards very slightly.
We went to the door (I did not want to do this, by the way) and knocked. Taking a dog up a strange walk to a strange front door is a bit nerve-wracking.
No answer. Even though there were two cars parked in the driveway.
I then looked across the street. There was a car parked there directly across from the creaking car. I went up to their door (I really did not want to do this, by the way) and rang the bell. No answer. There were two cars parked there. And shoes outside the door.
Do people in our little town just not answer the door to men with dogs? I have no idea.
Do cars just settle into their parking brake? Or do they only creak when, Hollywood-style, the cables are fraying? I have no idea.
What to do? How much effort and annoying of people does one do, based on a concern or suspicion?
We kept walking.
“When I turn on the TV, I see wall-to-wall Humvees, and I’m proud,” said Sam Bernstein, a 51-year-old antiquities dealer who lives in Marin County, Calif., and drives a Hummer H2, an S.U.V. sibling of the military Humvee.
“They’re not out there in Audi A4’s,” he said of the troops.